Traditionally, recliner chairs have been specialty furniture items which were primarily designed for comfort, not styling. In many cases, they occupied a special status in the home as they did not conform to the existing styling of other furniture items in the home. However, the evolution of styling of home interiors has progressed to the point where today it is of major concern. Thus, in many instances, the recliner chair can no longer enjoy special status free of present day styling requirements which not only dictate, in many cases, low styling with T-seat cushions, but also that the chairs be capable of placement adjacent a wall like any other upholstered chair. The latter desideratum has given rise to what is known in the industry today as the wall avoiding chair which is a recliner chair that can be placed adjacent a wall and yet its backrest will not strike the wall when the chair is moved to reclining position.
Most wall avoiding chairs of the past and present have utilized tracks on which the chair arms are slidable forwardly in order to provide wall avoiding action. However, such tracks require precision construction and assembly to prevent jamming of parts in the tracks and malfunctioning of the wall avoiding action which has been known to occur after repeated but normal usage of the chair.
In addition, such conventional wall avoiding chairs utilizing tracks suffer from the styling drawback that the seat must be separated from the arms of the chair to permit the movement of the arms in the tracks. This impairs the use of T-cushion seat styling which has now become quite desirable for recliner chairs. Further, many of these wall avoiding chairs were only two-way recliners providing only limited types of reclining comfort as compared to that achieved by three-way recliners.
While, in the past, there was an attempt at marketing a three-way wall avoiding chair which provided wall avoiding action without the need of tracks as described above, such a chair did not have a TV position; which position is now virtually a standard requirement, if not a highly desirable feature of recliner chairs.